Images of Historic Petersburgh

In the late 19th century, Petersburgh enjoyed many cultural fixtures, among them a photography club. Many of the photos originated thus, and were often on glass plates. The photos, along with the plates were eventually stored away in Victoria Green’s barn. She and Lloyd Hewitt rescued them and gave the treasures to the Bennington Museum. Richard Weaver, later the Town Historian, collected these and many others and placed them in albums, and with a generous grant of town funds, had the glass plates converted to regular photo negatives, which were then developed. In 1976 the Auxiliary of the Petersburgh Fire Department produced the paper versions of many of the photos we currently have copies of.

It should be noted that some of the photos are not from the original glass plates but were collected from various sources over the years by Mr. Weaver.

Between c. 2015 and 2018, Sharon (town librarian at the time) and Steve Hodges assembled photo collections gathered during the 1991 Centennial celebration and uploaded them to Flickr, along with the existing first Weaver collection, thereby making them available to the public from a home computer. In 2023, Barton McLean, through the newly-formed Friends of Petersburgh History group, took the existing collection and added many other photos recently given by Weaver's widow, Merle Weaver Ramsey, while renaming and reorganizing the collection, which had grown beyond its original scope. Dr. McLean has had generous help from the group, particularly drawing on the knowledge and generosity of Town Historian Peter Schaaphok and his book of early photos "Petersburgh, Then and Now," which is available at the Petersburgh Library.